Lord, Make me a Rainbow

 Lord, Make me a Rainbow

By Bobby Neal Winters

Songs sometimes talk to each other.  Or should I say, sing to each other? I’ve got a friend who calls that “inter-textuality.”  That’s a good word.

A lot of songs do that, but the pair I am thinking about in particular are “If I die young” by the Band Perry and “Bury My Bones” by Whiskey Myers.

These songs are talking to each other.  Indeed, to my ear--as untrained as it is--it appears that “Bury my Bones” was inspired by “If I die young,” as it begins with not only the same words but also some of the same notes.  Someone who actually knew something about music could tell you more.

Each of the songs takes the viewpoint of a young person confronting their own mortality.  The idea that they would die one day has come into their respective minds and they are contemplating the consequences of that event.

This is a phenomenon that is not uncommon.  Many a teenager has inspected the idea that if they were to die, then everyone would be sorry. Tragically, many have acted on that.  This is one reason we need to be careful of anything that cultivates that sort of ideation.

Fortunately, these are songs from country music, and if you can survive all of the tragedy portrayed within that milieu, you are pretty dang tough anyway. 

They interest me because of the contrasting points of view. Each comes from a different point in spacetime which affects their vision. I have my own which affects mine.

I’ve formed a picture of the author of “If I die young” from listening to the song.  It is written from the point of view of a teenage girl in a middle-class Southern home.  They are church-going folks.  She reads a lot.  Her reading has created for her a rich world that only occasionally makes contact with reality. 

“If I die young, bury me in satin

Lay me down on a bed of roses

Sink me in the river at dawn

Send me away with the words of a love song.”

There are plans and expectations here. There is quite a bit of naivete, but, quite frankly, that is more than a bit of the song’s charm.

“Bury my Bones” is from a different place.

If I die young, write my mother

Tell her that I love her but my soul's gone home

And take my vessel to Anderson County

Drive real slow and take the long way home

Tell my kin to pick up a shovel

Wrestle that sugar sand and bury my bones

There is a sense here that the author has, perhaps, spent more time working a shovel than parting the pages of a book.

I will confess that I feel more of a geographical connection to Whiskey Myers (which is a band and not a person, by the way) than to the Band Perry.  Whiskey Myers is from Palestine, Texas which is in the East Texas oil country. It’s populated with oil field folks and that culture spills over into my part of Oklahoma.  Or it spilled from Oklahoma to East Texas, but we don’t want to take the blame if we don’t have to.

Each of the songs touches upon religion, but “If I die young” does so much more explicitly.

Lord, make me a rainbow, I'll shine down on my mother

She'll know I'm safe with you when she stands under my colors

There is an expectation that God will make her a rainbow to inform her mother that she has made her entrance into Heaven.

The reference from “Bury my bones” is much more subtle.  So much so, it could be missed:

And take my vessel to Anderson County

There is a model that he is just a spirit that is simply residing in a body.  His vessel is dead, but perhaps his spirit carries on. But there aren’t any explicit expectations laid out.

There are more differences due to differing socio-economic environments and their respective sexes, female and male. To me, the striking commonality is the concern for their mothers. In the end, the mother child bond is so strong that we can even imagine it being broken at death. Our mothers spend so much time, energy, and their own bodies in our making that even in our most self-centered moments we must think of them.

Of the two songs, “If I die young” is the one I’ve listened to the most.  I almost always cry, because I am the father of middle-class daughters, some of whom read a lot.  I don’t think any of my daughters imagine that God would make a rainbow simply for them. No, wait, one of them might, but I won’t say which. (We know.) 

That having been said, I can personally identify with more of the art produced by Whiskey Myers. They seem to have experienced a world similar to the one I left when I went off to become a math teacher. Their song “Broken Window Serenade” draws a flood of tears from me whenever I listen to it.

Crying is important.  Because, like the young people who wrote these songs, we come to the realization that we are going to die.  We cry for the ones we’ve lost; we cry for the ones we are afraid of losing; we cry for ourselves while we still have the vessels to cry from.

And we can look at a rainbow and imagine the loved ones we’ve lost are safe.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.